Memories of Us
by SweetNSourSniffles
Summary: Love in Migar's Slums. A story filled with love, jealousy, hate, beauty, & deception.
1. Chapter 1

Life down here was never easy. No one ever said life was easy. But when you've lived your whole life beaten, cold, worn, and starved... Well you just get used to the fact that this is your life. It's never gonna change. It's that simple. Isn't it.

Life in Midgar.

Life under the plate.

Life in the Slums.

These are the memoirs of a young girl. A young girl with hopes and dreams.

No. These are the memoirs of a young _woman_, who fell in love with a young man… and would never stop loving him.

My eyes open to only see darkness.

It is morning, but there is no sun.

No sky. No sun. Nothing but that depressing metal plate.

I _was _thirteen. And never seen the sun. Never met my parents. Never accomplished anything. Never went to school. Never had a job. But I am a survivor because of him. No he is not my husband, he is not my boyfriend, he isn't even my lover… he is my best friend, he is my only _family_.

Drugs deals. Late nights. Parties. Gangs. Fights. The normal life for a young person surviving in the slums. Pimps. Hookers. Hustlers. Drug Dealers. We ran with the other people just trying to survive in this miserable place. Me... I am no hooker, like many of the other girls here my age. If it weren't for him, it might be a different story… I'm pretty enough, I'd make more than enough money, but he wouldn't let me degrade myself like that. I even got offered a job at the infamous Honeybee Inn, but he refused to let me sell my body. We didn't need money that badly, he had told me.

_So how do we survive?_ He is a hustler. He does anything he can do to help us survive. Drugs, stealing, scams, and not to mention that we had a very well-known friendship with The _Kings_. A gang, of course. I know it's not a respectable lifestyle, but what else could he do? He didn't just have to take care of himself, he had to take care of me… and even if what he did wasn't considered traditionally respectable, I respected him for all he did for me. To many others it might seem like he was ruthless, or even that he had a cold heart, but I knew better.

I rose from the single bed, and looked over for a moment at him lying on the couch. He always slept on the couch, every night for all these years. Lighting a cigarette and sitting at the window sill, I see water falling from the plate above. It must be raining up there. It must be a storm. This is the only time we ever get a taste of the life above. I inhale and the strong smoke filling my lungs revives me. It makes me feel alive. I feel... something.

"It's raining up there…" I spoke to the man I loved, not looking down at him… I never looked him in the eyes, I was scared he might see how I felt about him. I had always thought he was good-looking with his tall thin frame, wispy crimson hair, and those ever-sparkling turquoise eyes. I caught girls staring at him all the time and I was often pained with jealousy, but like I said, his good looks had no influence on the way I had _fell_ for him.

He had cared for me, really cared for me. No one else had put in this much hard work to take care of me; the adults at the orphanage never cared, and my parents had abandoned me for drugs when I was only a baby. This young man took care of me, fed me, clothed me, and made sure we had enough money to stay in this hotel every night for these past three years. I loved him, and it was a love much more intense than anyone could ever know.

Still looking out the window at the bar across the street, I returned my focus back to this place we lived in. There was a fight and a lot of yelling going on outside, and he would be getting up soon to go see what was going on. Looking down I could see Darien from the _Kings_. He was tall and broad, with long brown hair and brown eyes. I hated him, he was always so full of himself. He was one of those guys that thought he was god's gift to woman, and he was always trying to hit on me.

He stopped and called up towards our room. I would've just ignored him like every other day, thinking that he just wanted me to come down and have a drink with him at the bar, but today it was different. He wasn't calling for me and there was yelling come from the bar. Something was wrong. I looked towards the man I loved, and feared for his life. I felt this for him at least once everyday, but like everything else today, it was different.

"Be careful…" I spoke to him as he ran out of the room, but he didn't hear me. "I love you."

I know it's going to sound typical of anyone in my position to think what I'm thinking but...

I wish I knew what life was like on the upperplate.

Life of the rich and famous. Life of the lucky ones.

Sun. Rain. Sky. Stars. Fresh air. I want to experience it all.

Just Once. Fuck Shinra. _**God damn fucking Shinra.**_


	2. Chapter 2

"_**Do Not Brood Over Your Past Mistakes & Failures As This Will Only Fill Your Mind With Grief, Regret, & Depression. Do Not Repeat Them In The Future." **_

Within the domain that people called Midgar, lived a young boy with fierce red hair and shocking turquoise eyes. He trudged down the streets, the thick smog that people called air, filling heavily in his lungs. He coughed, choking on the fumes from the plate above. His mother had once told him that the people of Shinra had put the plate in the sky to keep the pollution from the reactors and garbage here in the slums, so that the people above could live healthily. A single sweat bead dropped from the young boy's forehead, the air hot with pollution. This was the sewer of Midgar.

"Have you seen my mommy?"

Reno asked, walking around the streets that supposedly belonged to the prostitutes and their pimps. This is where his mother worked her long hours, but she hadn't come home in two days. His father, someone important from the city above, was nonexistent when it came to Reno… His mother was the only person in his life.

"Have you seen my mommy?"

Reno's mother was once a beautiful woman with bright red curls and the same piercing turquoise eyes that she had blessed her son with, but the slums were not a place where beauty existed… at least not for long. As years gone on she found herself parent-less, like most young kids in the slums, and had to find a way to provide for herself. At seventeen she had her first and only child… lacking a man to father him. Seven years trying to get her and her son out of the slums, she found herself far too thin, using drugs to numb the pain, broke, and still prostituting.

"Have you seen my mommy?"

He continued to walk the streets, asking the answerless question. It took him two hours to find a familiar young woman, one of his mother's fellow prostitute friends, but she refused to tell him where his mother was.

"Sweetheart, I don't know." She spoke with a hint of fear in her voice. She placed her cold hand against the side of his cheek, her brown eyes rimmed with tears. She began to wonder how long it would be until his innocence was hardened by this terrible streets. "Maybe you should just go home."

His turquoise eyes filled with disappointment. "But where is mommy?"

Walking the streets as the night grew on, Reno refused to give up his search. He shivered in the darkness as rain echoed through the slums, the actual rain not in the slums but the rain above crashing against the plate. Reno had never seen rain, the sunrise, or anything other than these dangerous streets. Wandering into the section of the slums known for its drugs, as if drugs weren't obtainable in every part of the slums, he still asked the inevitable question until he found his answer.

"Have you seen my mommy?"

There was black limo in the middle of street, unusual for any car to be in the slums but a limo was impossibly rare. There stood his mother, much skinnier than usual as she seemed to be pleading with the men inside the limo. Reno smiled for a split second, but suddenly there was a loud bang as something was aimed out the window.

"Mommy!"

Reno screamed as he ran towards his mother, a crimson wound in her stomach. He shivered in the darkness, tears flowing down the sides of his cheeks. He held his mother in his arms, screaming for help before she reached her hand to his cheek.

"Reno, you're okay?"

"I'm fine, mommy. Everything's gonna be fine. Help! Someone help!"

"Are you okay?!?" A little girl approached Reno. Her dark hair chopped up to her ears and clearly unwashed. Her emerald eyes sparkling with sympathy. She touched one of her tiny hands to his shoulder, realizing that his mother was dying. "I'll get help."

The slums were home, he decided. You had to grow up and learn everything by yourself here in the slums. You had to take care of yourself because no one else would. The slums were a dangerous and absolutely terrible place, but this was his home… always and forever.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Not gonna get us.**_

_**Starting from here, let's make a promise… You and me, let's just be honest.  
We're gonna run, nothing can stop us… Even the night that falls all around us…**_

"So this is the life?" He chuckled, resting heavily on the swing seat, swinging back and forth in the empty park. "I love it already."

"Better than the orphanage." She shrugged as she sat in the swing, not swinging but sipping on a small bottle of vodka. "How long you figure until they catch us again. They're not gonna give us dinner for a week when they find out we've left again."

He threw back his head with drunken laughter, his crimson hair waving all about. "They aren't catching us this time." He was no more than twelve, and the girl no older than ten, both escapees dressed in rags, drinking in the middle of an abandoned park at three in the morning. "Gimme that!" The boy shouted, grabbing the bottle of cheap liquor from the girl. Then he spoke with a charming smirk, that smirk would later become a trademark of his. "You're too young to be drinking."

_**Soon there will be laughter and voices. Beyond the clouds over the mountains.  
We'll run away on roads that are empty. Lights from the airfield shining upon you.**_

"They found us before." The girl spoke in a tender and quiet voice. She was tired, and scared. Her hair now long and dark, covering most of her face. Her skin pale, her eyes a beautiful emerald but filled with so much fear. "They'll find us again."

"They've taken away five years of our life…" He stopped to ponder for a second. "…well on and off for five years, not counting all the times we've ran. We can't let them do this too us. We can survive out here…" He stopped again to raise his arms high into the air as recognition of the Slums. "Anyone can survive out here in these streets, we just gotta be strong and smart. But we're strong, right Blade? And we're smart."

"Right, Reno."

Silence filled the air for many moments, the two sitting quietly.

"What if bad things happen to us…" Blade paused for a second before continuing to speak. "Like what happened to your momma?"

Reno got up from his swing and stood in front of the innocent young girl. "You're like family to me. We've been the only ones there for each other ever since that day, and I wouldn't let that happen to you. We're young, we're kids, I know… but I'm going to take care of you." He paused to look down at her, expecting an appraising smile from his best friend, but the only thing in front of his eyes was a scared little girl. "If you're too scared, I'll take you back, but I'm not going with you."

She looked back up at Reno, then back to the sand of the playground.

He was the only stable thing in her life, the only person that had stayed around, her best friend.

She couldn't survive without him, and she refused to.

Looking around to scan this lonely sector of the Slums, she was filled with fear for a moment, but then she looked back into those turquoise eyes and knew that everything was going to be okay. Shaking her head softly, she looked up at Reno with a sincere smile. "I go where you go."

_**We'll run away, keep everything simple. Night will come down, our guardian angel.  
We rush ahead, the crossroads are empty. Our spirits rise, they're not gonna get us.**_

_**My love for you, always forever. Just you and me, all else is nothing.  
Not going back, not going back there. They don't understand us.**_

_**They're not gonna get us.**_


End file.
